


the anchorite archive

by Trillian_Astra



Category: Archive 81 (Podcast), Ars Paradoxica (Podcast)
Genre: Crossover, Found Footage, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-09
Updated: 2017-05-09
Packaged: 2018-10-29 23:50:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10864680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trillian_Astra/pseuds/Trillian_Astra
Summary: While sorting through the tapes recorded at the Visser building, Dan finds a very different set of recordings - made by a woman in 1943 who claims to be a time-traveller from the future.





	the anchorite archive

Dan heard the tape player click as the it reached the end of the current tape, and reached over to eject it. He carefully replaced it in its plastic box and made sure it was filed away in the right order, ensuring that whoever worked with these tapes after him would not find them in the jumbled mess that he’d been handed.

He reached for the next tape automatically, sliding it into the player and pressing ‘Play’ before he even looked at the label on the case. He’d come across so many tapes on this shelf that all started the same way, with one of Melody’s interviews, it was likely that this would be more of the same.

_So, sidetrack: when I was young, my parents took me to see the USS Intrepid in New York City. It’s a docked aircraft carrier from World War II that had been retired and then renovated into a sea, air and space museum. The Lunar Lander was there, and my parents had wanted me to see the capsule my grandfather had landed on the moon in._

The recording broke up into static for a second, but before Dan could reach for the controls it cleared up and continued:

_But, back to the ship: once my vision cleared a bit and I could finally see where I was, I remembered thinking that this ship looked almost exactly like what I remembered. Except that here, the controls weren’t sealed behind plexiglas? The one thing I couldn’t recall was the holding cell. It was just a cage. A closet, with bars, stuffed in the corner of one room, no more than five feet across. The sailors put me down as gently as they could, locked the door shut, and left._

“Huh?” Dan said out loud as he paused the tape. The speaker sounded female and American, and was obviously not Melody Pendras. And why was she talking about an aircraft carrier? He scribbled down the names _USS Intrepid_ and _Lunar Lander_ – not that many people had landed on the moon, so surely the speaker’s grandfather wouldn’t be hard to identify. Maybe he could call Mark, get him to look this up online.  Dan glanced down at the case he’d taken the tape from. It did look different to the Visser tapes… and it had a label reading _Grissom, S. – Anchorite Archive – 1_.

“What the… Ratty, have you ever heard of something called the Anchorite Archive?”

The rat squeaked once, and went back to the crumb of cheese it had found on the floor.

“More importantly, how did it get mixed up with the Visser tapes?”

Ratty, being a rat, didn’t answer, but twitched a whisker and carried on eating.

Dan checked the tape player, rewinding the tape all the way to the start just in case there was an introduction at the front that would explain it.

All he got was a bit of static, and then:

_Hello? Testing, one two… Okay! This is the audio diary of Sally Grissom. The date today is… Hell, does it even matter? It’s October 29th. 1943, I guess. For me, that’s the day after August 14th, 20_ _█_ _. So, whatever that means._

It was the same voice. Her name was Sally, apparently, and she was recording in 1943. But what did she mean, “for me, that’s the day after August fourteenth”? Either it was October twenty-ninth or it wasn’t… And what was that weird blip? She definitely said twenty-something, but no matter what Dan tried, he couldn’t clear up the rest of the year.  He sighed, knowing what he would have to do. He’d just have to play the entire tape and see if he could pick up any more details. He scribbled the name Sally Grissom on his scrap of paper and pressed ‘Play’.

~

“Dan! Hey, how are you?”

“Hey, man. Uh, I’m good.”

“How’s work?”

“Normal, I guess. Uh… I know I already owe you, like, five favours but could you do something for me?”

“Sure, what is it?”

“You managed to find out about that… band… for me before, I wondered if you could look someone up… her name’s Sally Grissom? I don’t need anything detailed, just something about who she was. And, uh, if you could see if she had anything do with something called Project Rainbow?”

“I’ll see what I can dig up.” Mark sounded concerned. “Are you all right, Dan?”

“Yeah, uh… I’d just like to know what’s going on. And I’m not sleeping too well.”

“OK, well, I’ll see what I can find on this Sally person. You get some rest, yeah?”

“Thanks, dude.”

“No problem. I’ll call you, OK?”

~

Once he’d finished the first tape, Dan turned to the shelf he’d found it on, Sally’s sign-off still ringing in his ears.

_My name is Sally Grissom, and I think I accidentally invented time travel_

_I think I accidentally invented time travel_

_I accidentally invented time travel_

_invented time travel_

A couple of hours later, he had a pile of tapes that appeared to be Visser-related, and a smaller pile with labels referencing Anchorites or Sally or someone called “A. Partridge” – he had about twenty so far. There was also something resembling a Dictaphone sealed in a plastic bag.

~

“Hi, Mark, thanks for calling me back…”

“No problem. So, I looked into that name you gave me…”

“Yeah? Did you find her?”

“Well, maybe. I did find a reference to a Dr Sally Grissom working on that supercollider project in Texas a few years ago.”

“A few- okay, was there anything earlier?”

“A death record for a woman called Sally Grissom in 1990. She was in her mid-eighties.”

“So, she could have been around in the war? In 1943?”

“I guess, why?”

“Uh, no reason. What about Project Rainbow?”

“Nice deflection, Dan. Project Rainbow was actually the easiest thing to find – it’s referenced on a few hundred conspiracy forums.”

“Huh?”

“It’s more generally known as the Philadelphia Experiment – “Project Rainbow” is supposedly the military code name. It’s an urban legend, the military was playing around with cloaking devices or something… I dunno, no-one can agree on what the project was actually trying to achieve. What I do know is that as far as the military are concerned, it never happened.”

“It never happened….”

“Yeah. Just a lot of _we can neither confirm nor deny_ when I tried to dig into that.”

Dan sat back in his chair, digesting what he’d just heard.

“Dan? You there?”

“I’m here. I was thinking. Thanks for your help, dude. I really appreciate it, you know that, right?”

“Yeah, I know. You can pay me back for all these favours when you get home.”

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Quotes from Sally's audio diary (as heard in episode 1 of ars Paradoxica "Hypothesis") taken from the episode transcript at https://arsparadoxica.com/01-hypothesis-transcript. Credit for those goes to Daniel Manning and Mischa Stanton.
> 
> Archive 81 (and the characters Dan and Mark) is a production of Dead Signals.


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